Still the Same, No Matter the Place

People find the oddest things to note on the back of photographs. Perhaps that is only because they view such an activity in the context of their current situation: here's a picture from that fun outing we did last week, and, oh, you need to know this unusual detail about some extraneous point about the trip. No names, no dates. Nothing, at least, that an audience one hundred years later might be curious to know.

Of course, the person sending the note on the back of a carte de visite in the 1870s would not normally consider that someone in 2018 would be trying to decipher just what that fountain pen was trying to communicate. What I suspect, however, is that the great-great-grandchildren of the subject of that photograph would like to know a bit more about the thing—at least, if those great-great-grandchildren are anything like me.

Thanks to input from those of you who know people from Germany—or, in one case, someone who actually spent some time living in Heidelberg—we may soon have a verdict on exactly what that handwritten scrawl said on the back of that photograph I found in an antique store in northern California. In the meantime, I thought perhaps the rest of the material written on the back of that small photograph might reveal enough details for us to learn more about the photograph's subject.

So I put the phrases on the back of the picture through their paces at Google Translate and Google Maps.

The photographer listed on the back of this picture, Eduard Schultze, had a studio located in Heidelberg. Above the photographer's name was the entry, "79. Plöckstrasse 79." Though I know nothing about the German language, I thought it might be an educated guess to assume that entry was actually the address of the studio. So I went to check it out on Google Maps. Maybe there was a Plöckstrasse in Heidelberg in 1876, but apparently there isn't any such location there now. Düsseldorf, perhaps. But not Heidelberg.

There's no missing the fact that the photograph was taken in Heidelberg. I had to set aside that puzzle and move on to the next clue: the line printed on the bottom of the card: "Die Platte bleibt für Nachbestellungen aufbewahrt."

How very German I feel, even managing to write all that! But I still have no idea what it means. So off to Google Translate I went with my newfound ability to add umlauts to my English keyboarding capabilities. (Truth be told, I actually cheated here: having selected the translate-from dialog box's target language as German, I clicked on the keyboard icon in the window at Google Translate which said, "turn on Virtual Keyboard." Instant umlauts, which can then be cut and pasted into my text here.)

Being so smart still didn't help my cause. No matter where our ancestors posed for their portrait, all studios seemed to serve up the same offer. In Germany, as in the United States, that offer essentially gave customers a variant of the Schultze studio's promise: "The plate is kept for reordering."

No Hints from Heidelberg

If we can't figure out French handwriting, how about trying German?

I'm still determined to find a way to send home the hundred year old photograph of two adorable French Canadian children, but until I can figure out a way to tap into some local resources in Quebec, Canada, we'll have to set aside that mystery.

Meanwhile, there are more photographs to review from that shopping trip to the antique store in the hills of northern California.

True to form—Gold Rush country seems to yield such results—there were more than that one photograph with an inscription on the reverse in a foreign language. One photograph in particular was an item I couldn't resist buying. For one thing, the handwritten date revealed that was possibly the oldest picture I had found in the store. On the positive side, there were three lines of handwritten notes on the back of that photo. The down side was that I didn't attempt to read what the note said while I was still in the store.

Perhaps I should have tried that approach before buying the thing.

What I thought I was seeing was handwriting in German. After all, the photographer's imprint was from Heidelberg. Sounds pretty German to me. And the size of the picture's format seemed to fit with photographs produced during that time period. But I knew I wouldn't really be able to tell what the handwriting said until I got the thing home, scanned and enlarged it.

That done—months afterwards—I still can't read that handwriting. Perhaps that is owing to that little inconvenience of not knowing how to read German (or at least German script). What I can tell are the two dates—one being the year 1873 and the other a specific date in 1876.

While those three lines of handwriting don't seem to have provided the clues I was hoping for—a name would have been a nice touch—they do say something. And perhaps that something will be pertinent to our search. While I may not know much about the German language—and definitely not much about how it is written—perhaps someone here does.

So, to start with...anyone here know how to read German? Here's the note, as big as I can enlarge it while keeping it fairly legible.

Or maybe it isn't German, after all...

When Spelling Becomes the Villain in the Story

If someone in Montreal spelled his surname Hallée, how would people pronounce his name, once he moved to California? Would the resultant mispronunciation still be spelled the same way? Or would mispronunciation lead the unsuspecting hearer to mangle how the name is written?

I've seen that metamorphosis occur in the case of other immigrants, arriving on American shores from a place where English was, at best, a second language. Americans have not, historically, been the most careful to listen to nuances of other languages. Nor were government officials—I'm thinking census enumerators here—the most careful at replicating proper spelling as it might have been rendered in the fatherland.

So how would a census taker write down a name like Hallée? Would it be reasonable to expect that Hallie would be the result? How about Halley? Or Hally?

In trying to find the source for the hundred year old photo postcard of the two adorable children, Emile and Lucien Hallée, it occurred to me that their adoring mama might have sent the card off to a relative in California who also might have possessed the same surname. Just in case, I looked to see whether there were any Hallée families in California.

The result? While there was indeed one Raoul Hallée, born in Canada in 1912, he lived far from the northern California hills where I first discovered the photograph.

There were, however, several other spelling variations for that same surname here in California. I'm tempted to broaden my search from the properly-spelled Hallée to the wide world of spelling permutations, out in the wild west—or at least a vicinity closer to the west coast region where that darling photograph ended up abandoned in an antique shop.

Such a task, though, will complicate matters. Yes, I can use wildcard symbols in my searches, but that widens the universe of possibilities quite a bit—maybe even a bit too much. Spelling can indeed become the enemy of the unassuming researcher who just wants to find the right answer.

Maybe spelling isn't the only adversary in this search, though. To see clearly to an answer, it takes being careful about how to choose one's assumptions.

Of course, this is an example of one of my assumptions—that the photograph was sent to a family member with the same surname. Perhaps it was sent to a former neighbor—as we saw in the case of Thirza Browne Cole's collection of memorabilia from her childhood home in Greeley, Colorado. But in this case, it was encouraging to discover that there was, indeed, such a name as Hallée, both in Quebec, and in California. And yet, it will take far more than just that encouragement to be able to send the photo of P. Emile and Lucien Hallée back home to family, no matter where they live.

Another Hundred Year Old Photo Heads Home

It was back on February 13 when I sent a Facebook message to the only descendant I could find in the family of Alta Barnes. Since I had found not one, but five, photographs of Alta's family, I really wanted to send those abandoned hundred year old pictures home. But you know how Facebook messenger can be—especially for those of us who are trying to reach out to people who are not "friends"—it is never certain that the message actually gets delivered.

I remember a while back when Facebook expected people to pony up one dollar for the privilege of contacting not-friends. At other times, I had heard that the message just doesn't get sent—leaving those who gathered up enough guts to contact a stranger to twist in the wind of self-doubt.

I didn't really know where I stood, in the current not-friend contacting policy at Facebook. Judging from the lack of any answer, I figured the current protocol was to leave the messenger guessing.

Late last Thursday evening, though, my Facebook message-in-a-bottle got answered. I wasn't even looking for it, so was just about to shut down everything for the night. Thankfully, I spotted it and sent back a hasty note.

With relief, I can now let you know that one of the biggest family photo collections I had found since starting this abandoned photograph project is now headed home. Although the photos will not be going to Alta's grandchildren—at least not yet—they will be mailed to a family member. For that, I'm excited. Hopefully, this relative is in touch with Alta's grandchildren and will be able to share from the collection.

It's been interesting, as I do this project, to see how some people are so enthused to receive such an old family picture, while others are next to impossible to even contact. I guess that goes to show us that genealogy is not the uppermost consideration in some people's minds, as inconceivable as we may find that thought. And while some people just adore old photographs, others look at them as just so much clutter to be discarded. In my mind, I've started imagining a Groundhog Day scene where the descendants boxes up old family photographs, send them off to some secondhand store to get rid of them at a profit, and turn around only to find the photos being returned to them, time after time, in a never-ending time loop of the same scene.

At least, my experiences haven't brought me to any descendant at that extreme. Yet.

For now, the photos of Alta Barnes and her siblings will at last be on their way back home to Oklahoma. The biggest group to have stumped me is finally going to be reunited with family.

Above: The photograph of big sister Alta Barnes and her baby brother Jimmie and younger sister Helen are finally headed home, along with the rest of the photographs of the Barnes family.

Yes, We Have a Keeper

I'm not sure why I was surprised to find a postcard inscribed in French at that northern California antique shop where I rescue abandoned family photographs. After all, people from around the world flocked to Gold Country after the California gold rush made international news—and quite a few of them settled there afterwards. Still, it somehow seemed a novelty to me, so I bought the picture postcard, intending to find a way to send it home to family, one hundred years later.

Now that I'm actually trying to figure out just who that family might be, I'm getting concerned that I won't be able to make it to mission accomplished. After all that self-talk last Friday—a pep talk designed to convince me to keep going on this project—I realized the first step needed to be to take that handwritten surname out for a test drive on the genealogical websites at my disposal.

My first step was to put "Hallee" through its paces at Ancestry.com. Thankfully, it did turn out that there is such a name in Quebec, Canada, the geographic area I'm guessing was home for the family at that time. Correct that: the name was likely written as "Halleé," possibly explaining that slight dot (or dash) above the double "e" in the postcard, which had at first made me think the handwriting was signifying "Hallie" rather than "Hallee."

With that good news confirming that I am on the right track to assume the word Hallee affixed to the bottom of the postcard was the surname for the children posing for their photograph, I then proceeded to test the waters further. Next question: could there be a Lucien Hallee? How about a P. Emile Hallee?

There were, indeed, such hits to my searches. In fact, I found more than one instance of each name. The problem was: I couldn't find any one family in Quebec province that included both children's names. I could find a Hallee family with a Lucien. Or an Emile.

Worse, once I took a good look at the actual document, I discovered one census record transcribed as Hallee was likely for a Vallee family. Another disappointment was that I found a Lucien Hallee in Find A Grave memorials—born in May, 1915, the poor baby was gone in just one brief year.

I did find a Paul Emile Hallee in the Find A Grave memorials, but his date of birth was slightly beyond what we had determined would be a latest possible date of birth—this one was born in 1920.

I even found a family tree on Ancestry.com which included both a Paul Emile and a Lucien Hallee—but Lucien was uncle to Paul Emile. That would never do, of course, because the postcard had signified that Lucien was the younger of the two children, certainly not the case here.

Of course, I can take my search to FamilySearch.org, as well as to FindMyPast and MyHeritage, since I hold a subscription to each of these sites. And I have other thoughts about getting creative in this unusual search.

In the meantime, though, something else came up over the weekend, which requires us to shift our attention to some unfinished business from previous photograph rescue missions for tomorrow's post.

 

A Genealogical "Tragedy of the Commons"

Who would have thought that the quiet pursuit of family history undertaken by such retiring wallflowers as we genealogists are would one day become the buzz vibrating off the front page of newspapers across the country—no, make that around the world. I had already accessed at least a dozen reports as the news broke about the arrest of the murderer known in the 1970s and 1980s as the Golden State Killer—from news sources as notable as The New York Times and the Washington Post, and more local publications like those in Sacramento and San Jose, here in California. The courthouse where the drama came to a head is itself less than an hour's drive from my home.

Techniques which I have put to use for what I considered to be of private, personal interest are suddenly the talk of every news reporter, it seems. The procedures of genealogical research, and in particular the pursuit of genetic genealogy, are not concepts I'd expect the average person to want to read up on in the local newspaper.

But suddenly, this has become our new reality.

People had begun realizing that law enforcement had discovered what a trove of information could be obtained through genealogical websites—witness Debbie Kennett's warnings on Twitter after the Buckskin Girl's identity was uncovered—and now, it seems genealogy is not just for genealogists.

There's a lot to digest in what's been happening in the past half month. On one hand, more people are now interested in just what can be accomplished through genealogical research. Many of those people are curious for the simple—and commonly shared—desire to know more about their roots. Those are the people who thrive on shows like the upcoming return of the series Who Do You Think You Are?

But there are others. And those others aren't here rubbing elbows with us researchers because they want to figure out what grandma's maiden name really was. Some of them may have come to our table because they had altruistic intentions: finally discovering the identity of the family of a deceased John Doe to bring closure to the wearying wondering about whatever happened to a missing relative. Others feel their actions will be perceived by the general public as heroic: apprehending a vicious—and elusive—criminal and bringing him to justice.


When we realize that all problems—just like the people we study in our pedigrees—weave a well-connected web, we can see that the solution hailed by some can precipitate unintended consequences shunned by others as detrimental. The intricate connections require a delicate balance to meet needs without shattering rights.

Yet, if we don't take action to preserve this delicate balance—seeking solutions without detracting from necessary counterbalances—we run the problem of destroying the very tools we've created for our benefit.

In a way, the drama unfolding this past week with the hoped-for arraignment of a long-sought violent criminal may be just the trigger to instigate a downward spiral and perpetrate genealogy's own Tragedy of the Commons. Genealogists realize that, to advance their own individual research goals, it is best to pool their resources. This we have done, for instance, through supporting organizations which digitize the huge volumes of documentation we require for our research. We have also achieved the same utility through our ability to compare genetic data with each other. This, we do in search of unknown relatives who might hold the key to answering the genealogical questions which stump us. But when others slip in unawares to use that same community of support for different reasons, they detract from the common pool of resources set up for sharing by a community with a mutual goal.

The chill factor of realizing how the techniques we use have suddenly turned against our community—in that sharing is no longer seen as favorably as an option in mutually-beneficial research protocols—is not unlike that old tale of the Tragedy of the Commons. Our shared resource—in this case, GEDmatch.com—has now been freely used by individuals for their own, non-genealogical, purposes simply because they could be used that way.

Whether we see an exodus from the service on account of this week's news developments or not, we will surely see an impact. My hope is that the leaders in our own field will be insightful enough to implement mitigating solutions to prevent our shared genetic genealogy systems from deteriorating to the point that led to the tragedy of that original tale.

Chill Factor of a Hot Case

When the news broke on Thursday that a suspect in one of our state's most puzzling cold cases had been apprehended, we found ourselves reading, in the nation's newspapers, terms quite familiar to genealogists. One would hardly have expected news outlets to bandy about phrases like "genetic triangulation," but with Thursday's BuzzFeedNews article on the arrest of suspected Golden State Killer, such specialized terms became mainstreamed.

Arrested this week for crimes committed back in an era when investigators called in their reports from pay phones and wrote them up on a typewriter, the suspect in question had eluded authorities for decades. Had it not been for technological advances developed in the past decade, the man quite likely could have brought his secret with him to the grave.

The game changer was DNA testing. Apparently, investigators associated with a multi-county task force took DNA samples collected from several linked crime sites and uploaded the raw data to a website commonly used by genetic genealogy enthusiasts. From that point, they pinpointed matching relatives, built out family trees, and examined the resultant family members for possible suspects.

Just like we do, when seeking that elusive "brick wall" ancestor. Only this time, the researchers were seeking a rapist and murderer known for vicious attacks across the state of California in the 1970s and 1980s.

There are some problems with this scenario. Early news reports made mention of genealogical websites—signifying use of more than one—as being used in their investigation. Yet Ancestry.com, 23andMe, MyHeritage and Family Tree DNA were quick to announce that they had not been approached formally by law enforcement agencies. Eventually, the news came out that one of the websites that were used was GEDmatch.com, at which time their management posted a statement to that effect on their site.

Even if that was the case, there are still some unanswered questions about the protocol. Those of us who routinely use the DNA testing sites, as well as GEDmatch.com, are quite familiar with how the process works while, admittedly, a journalist might not be as knowledgeable. But one by one, the questions did start trickling through on reports. As a 23andMe representative mentioned in a report by the San Jose, California, Mercury News, "Detectives could not have simply taken the East Area Rapist DNA profile they had from crime scenes...signed up for a service and entered that profile."

In an excellent analysis of the situation, Leah Larkin observed in her blog post at The DNA Geek that it would have been necessary for investigators to "create a mock genealogy DNA test that could be uploaded." Indeed, since commercial companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe extract genetic profiles from samples sent directly to them by their customers, rather than permitting transfers of raw data to their databases, it would "not be easy for law enforcement to upload a profile to one of those sites," as The New York Times observed. (The only glitch in that assertion, of course, is 23andMe's ironic DNA Day reversal of this policy to allow limited raw data uploads.)

That, of course, would not preclude use of the websites at Family Tree DNA or MyHeritage, which both allow uploads of raw data. Each of these companies, however, has publicly announced that they were not formally approached by law enforcement for such a use.

Essentially, beyond all of the major DNA testing companies providing cousin matches, that leaves GEDmatch. A free, publicly-accessible database, GEDmatch allows uploading of raw DNA data and the subsequent capability of viewing genetic matches from willing others who are also participating in the service.

There were some observations about this use. Besides the question of just how the law enforcement personnel were able to generate the raw data in a format acceptable by GEDmatch (generally, occasional post-update incompatibility with other companies' chips has caused uploading problems for some customers of the main DNA companies), investigators would have had to create a fake user name and profile to gain entrance at GEDmatch. While this is not uncommon—many users try to provide anonymity for the DNA accounts they administer for relatives—the investigators would also have had to check a box on GEDmatch's website certifying that the DNA data they were uploading was either their own or that they had obtained authorization from the person from whom the DNA was obtained. How could they have obtained "authorization" from a person they didn't even know yet?

However it was done, the basic process apparently used by investigators was to upload DNA data to the GEDmatch service, look for family matches, build out a solid family tree for those matches, examine the likelihood of any family members' connection to the crimes (by such parameters as age and geographic proximity), and then zero in on the likeliest suspect.

Once that suspect was identified by DNA data and family tree, there was one more step: find the person in real life, now. Investigators located that one man, set up surveillance, and watched for an opportunity to snag some DNA from him. Within days, they had located an unnamed item the suspect had used and discarded in public. They checked that item for a viable DNA sample and compared the results with DNA gathered from those old crime scenes.

They had a match, initiating the arrest.

The entire scenario has generated an uproar, not only among genealogists but among ethicists and civil liberties proponents. On Friday, a New York Times reporter asked permission to query members of the "Genetic Genealogy Tips & Techniques" Facebook group about their current concerns regarding participation in the GEDmatch website, which generated a lively discussion and resulted in an article published online that same evening.

While some GEDmatch users were quite pleased to learn that techniques they use every day were applied to solving a notorious cold case, many others voiced concerns about the potential for misuse of what has been clearly designated as a set of tools for genealogists, not criminologists. Perhaps instigated by the general angst of our era, an overall sense of mistrust of intrusion by governmental agencies seeped through many of the comments on that discussion thread at Facebook.

One issue in particular seemed the obvious next question: now that we've seen how law enforcement officials can use such databases, what chill factor will reverberate through the future of genetic genealogy? It's hard to say in the heat of the moment, but over the long term, it will likely make its impact known in the aggregate through the individual choices of those who don't care to have their privately-submitted data co-opted by those who are not part of the intended users of this community.